Consider
the Critical Thinking: Where does Rollin "explain
possible interpretation of ambiguity through analysis of available details"? How
do the questions that Rollin poses enable her and the reader to "draw
inferences which demonstrate sophisticated, accurate and
insightful use of evidence"?

Consider the Development of the Idea:
Why would Rollin first reference a psychiatrist? How
broad is the range of expertise that Rollin considers? Notice that Rollin uses
both rhetorical questions and questions that require responses. In what
circumstances does she use each question and what purpose do they serve?

Motherhood is in trouble, and
it ought to be. A rude question is long overdue: Who needs it? The answer used
to be (1) society and (2) women. But now, with the impending horrors of
overpopulation, society desperately doesn't need it. And women don't need
it either. Thanks to the Motherhood Myththe idea that
having babies is something that all normal women instinctively want and need and
will enjoy doingthey just think they do.

The notion that the maternal
wish and the activity of mothering are instinctive or biologically predestined
is baloney. Try asking most sociologists, psychologists, psychoanalysts,
biologists - many of whom are mothers-about motherhood being instinctive: it's like
asking department store presidents if their Santa Clauses are real.
"Motherhood-­instinctive?" shouts distinguished sociologist/author Dr. Jessie
Bernard. "Biological destiny? Forget biology! If it were biology, people would
die from not doing it."

"Women don't need to be mothers
any more than they need spaghetti," says Dr. Richard Rabkin, a New York
psychiatrist. "But if you're in a world where everyone is eating spaghetti,
thinking they need it and want it, you will think so too. Romance has really
contami­nated science. So-called instincts have to do with stimulation. They are
not things that well up inside of you."

"When a woman says with feeling
that she craved her baby from within, she is putting into biological language
what is psychological," says University of Michigan psychoanalyst and
motherhood-researcher Dr. Frederick Wyatt. "There are no instincts," says Dr.
William Goode, president-elect of the American Sociological Association. "There
are reflexes, like eye-blinking, and drives, like sex. There is no innate drive
for children. Otherwise, the enormous cultural pressures that there are to
reproduce wouldn't exist. There are no cultural pres­sures to sell you on
getting your hand out of the fire."

There are, to be sure,
biologists and others who go on about biological destiny, that is, the innate or
instinctive goal of motherhood. (At the turn of the century, even good old
capitalism was explained by a theorist as "the instinct of
acquisitiveness.") And many psychoanalysts will hold the Freudian view that
women feel so rotten about not having a penis that they are necessarily
propelled into the child-wish to replace the missing organ. Psychoanalysts also
make much of the psychological need to repeat what one's parent of the same sex
has done. Since every woman has a mother, it is considered normal to wish to
imitate one's mother by being a mother.

There is, surely, a wish to
pass on love if one has received it, but to insist women must pass it on in the
same way is like insisting that every man whose father is a gardener has to be a
gardener. One dissenting psychoanalyst says, simply, "There is a wish to comply
with one's biology, yes, but we needn't and sometimes we shouldn't."
(Interestingly, the woman who has been the greatest contributor to child therapy
and who has probably given more to children than anyone alive is Dr. Anna Freud,
Freud's magnificent daughter, who is not a mother.)

Anyway, what an expert cast of
hundreds is telling us is, simply, that biological possibility and desire
are not the same as biological need. Women have childbearing equipment.
To choose not to use the equipment is no more blocking what is instinctive than
it is for a man who, muscles or no, chooses not to be a weight lifter.

So much for the wish. What
about the "instinctive" activity of mothering? One animal study shows
that when a young member of a species is put in a cage, say, with an older
member of the same species, the latter will act in a protective, "maternal" way.
But that goes for both males and females who have been "mothered" themselves.
And studies indicate that a human baby will also respond to whoever is around
playing mother-even if it's father.
Margaret Mead and many others frequently
point out that mothering can be a fine occupation, if you want it, for either
sex. Another experiment with monkeys who were brought up without mothers found
them lacking in maternal behavior toward their own offspring. A similar study
showed that monkeys brought up without other monkeys of the opposite sex had no
interest in mating-all of which suggests that both mothering and mating behavior
are learned, not instinctual. And, to turn the cart (or the baby carriage)
around, baby ducks who lovingly follow their mothers seemed, in the mother's
absence, to just as lovingly follow wooden ducks or even vacuum cleaners.

If motherhood isn't
instinctive, when and why, then, was the Motherhood Myth born? Until recently,
the entire question of maternal motivation was academic. Sex, like it or not,
meant babies. Not that there haven't always been a lot of interesting
contraceptive tries. But until the creation of the diaphragm in the 1880's, the
birth of babies was largely unavoidable. And, generally speaking, nobody really
seemed to mind. For one thing, people tend to be sort of good sports about what
seems to be inevitable. For another, in the past, the population needed beefing
up. Mortality rates were high, and agricultural cultures, particularly, have
always needed children to help out. So be­ cause it "just happened" and because
it was needed, motherhood was assumed to be innate.

Originally, it was the word of
God that got the ball rolling with "Be fruitful and multiply," a practical
suggestion, since the only people around then were Adam and Eve. But in no time,
supermoralists like
St. Augustine changed the tone of the message: "Intercourse,
even with one's legitimate wife, is unlawful and wicked where the conception of
the offspring is prevented," he, we assume, thundered. And the Roman Catholic
position was thus cemented. So then and now, procreation took on a curious value
among people who viewed (and view) the pleasures of sex as sinful. One could
partake in the sinful pleasure, but feel vindicated by the ensuing birth.
Motherhood cleaned up sex. Also, it cleaned up women, who have always been
considered some­what evil, because of Eve's transgression (". . . but the woman
was de­ceived and became a transgressor. Yet woman will be saved through bearing
children. . . ," I Timothy, 2:14-15), and somewhat dirty be­cause of menstruation.

And so, based on need,
inevitability, and pragmatic fantasy-the Myth worked, from society's
point of view-the Myth grew like corn in Kansas. And society reinforced it with
both laws and propaganda­ laws that made woman a chattel, denied her education
and personal mobility, and madonna propaganda that she was beautiful and
won­derful doing it and it was all beautiful and wonderful to do. (One rarely
sees a madonna washing dishes.)

In fact, the Myth
persisted-breaking some kind of record for long-lasting fallacies-until
something like yesterday. For as the truth about the Myth trickled in-as women's
rights increased, as women gradually got the message that it was certainly
possible for them to do most things that men did, that they live longer, that
their brains were not tinier-then, finally, when the really big news rolled in,
that they could choose whether or not to be mothers-what happened? The
Motherhood Myth soared higher than ever. As Betty Friedan made oh­so-clear in The Feminine Mystique, the '40's and '50's produced a group of ladies who
not only had babies as if they were going out of style (maybe they were) but, as
never before, they turned motherhood into a cult. First, they wallowed in the
aesthetics of it all-natural childbirth and nursing became maternal musts. Like
heavy-bellied os­triches, they grounded their heads in the sands of motherhood,
only coming up for air to say how utterly happy and fulfilled they were. But, as
Mrs. Friedan says only too plainly, they weren't. The Myth galloped on,
moreover, long after making babies had turned from practical asset to liability
for both individual parents and society. With the average cost of a
middle-class child figured conservatively at $30,000 (not in­cluding college),
any parent knows that the only people who benefit economically from children are
manufacturers of consumer goods. Hence all those gooey motherhood commercials.
And the Myth gathered momentum long after sheer numbers, while not yet
extinguishing us, have made us intensely uncomfortable. Almost all of our
societal problems, from minor discomforts like traffic to major ones like
hunger, the population people keep reminding us, have to do with there being too
many people. And who suffers most? The kids who have been so mindlessly brought
into the world, that's who. They are the ones who have to cope with all of the
difficult and dehumanizing conditions brought on by overpopulation. They are the
ones who have to cope with the psychological nausea of feeling unneeded by
society. That's not the only reason for drugs, but, surely, it's a leading
con­tender.

Unfortunately, the population
curbers are tripped up by a romantic, stubborn, ideological hurdle. How can
birth-control programs really be effective as long as the concept of glorious
motherhood remains un­changed? (Even poor old
Planned Parenthood has to
euphemize why not Planned Unparenthood?) Particularly among the poor,
moth­erhood is one of the few inherently positive institutions that are
accessible. As Berkeley demographer Judith Blake points out, "Poverty-oriented
birth control programs do not make sense as a welfare measure. . . as long as
existing pronatalist policies. . . encourage mat­ing, pregnancy, and the care,
support, and rearing of children." Or, she might have added, as long as the
less-than-idyllic child-rearing part of motherhood remains "in small print."

Sure, motherhood gets dumped on
sometimes:
Philip Wylie's Momism I got going in the '40's and
Philip Roth's
Portnoy's Complaint did its best to turn rancid the chicken-soup concept of
Jewish mother­hood. But these are viewed as the sour cries of a black humorist
here, a malcontent there. Everyone shudders, laughs, but it's like the mouse and
the elephant joke. Still, the Myth persists. Last April, a Brooklyn woman was
indicted on charges of manslaughter and negligent homicide-eleven children died
in a fire in a building she owned and criminally neglected-"But," sputtered her
lawyer, "my client, Mrs. Breslow, is a mother, a
grandmother, and a great-grandmother!"

Most remarkably, the Motherhood
Myth persists in the face of the most overwhelming maternal unhappiness and
incompetence. If re­production were merely superfluous and expensive, if the
experience were as rich and rewarding as the cliché would have us believe, if it
were a predominantly joyous trip for everyone riding-mother, father, child-then
the going everybody-should-have-two-children plan would suffice. Certainly,
there are a lot of joyous mothers and their children and (sometimes, not
necessarily) their husbands reflect their joy. But a lot of evidence suggests
that for more women than anyone wants to admit, motherhood can be miserable.
("If it weren't," says one psychiatrist wryly, "the world wouldn't be in the
mess it's in.") 1. Philip Wylie's A Generation of Vipers (1942) blamed
many of the ills of Americansociety on dominating
mothers.

There is a remarkable
statistical finding from a recent study of Dr. Bernard's, comparing the mental
illness and unhappiness of married mothers and single women. The latter group,
it turned out, was both markedly less sick and overtly more happy. Of course,
it's not easy to measure slippery attitudes like happiness. "Many women have
achieved a kind of reconciliation-a conformity," says Dr. Bernard,

that they interpret as
happiness. Since feminine happiness is supposed to lie in devoting one's life to
one's husband and children, they do that; so ipso facto, they assume they
are happy. And for many women, un­trained for independence and "processed" for
motherhood, they find their state far preferable to the alternatives, which
don't really exist.

Also, unhappy mothers are often
loath to admit it. For one thing, if in society's view not to be a mother is to
be a freak, not to be a blissful mother is to be a witch. Besides, unlike
a disappointing marriage, disappointing motherhood cannot be terminated by
divorce. Of course, none of that stops such a woman from expressing her
dissatis­faction in a variety of ways. Again, it is not only she who suffers but
her husband and children as well. Enter the harridan housewife, the carp­ing
shrew. The realities of motherhood can turn women into terrible people. And,
judging from the 50,000 cases of child abuse in the U.S. each year, some are
worse than terrible.

In some cases, the unpleasing
realities of motherhood begin even before the beginning. In Her Infinite
Variety, Morton Hunt
describes young married women pregnant for the first
time as "very likely to be frightened and depressed, masking these feelings in
order not to be considered contemptible. The arrival of pregnancy interrupts a
pleasant dream of motherhood and awakens them to the realization that they have
too little money, or not enough space, or unresolved marital problems. . . ."

The following are random quotes
from interviews with some mothers in Ann Arbor, Mich., who described themselves
as reasonably happy. They all had positive things to say about their children,
al­though when asked about the best moment of their day, they all
confessed it was when the children were in bed. Here is the rest:

Suddenly I had to devote myself
to the child totally. I was under the illusion that the baby was going to fit
into my life, and I found that I had to switch my life and my schedule to fit
him. You think, "I'm in love, I'll get married, and we'll have a baby."
First there's two, then three, it's simple and romantic. You don't even think
about the work. . .

You never get away from the
responsibility. Even when you leave the children with a sitter, you are not out
from under the pressure of the responsibility. . . .

I hate ironing their pants and
doing their underwear, and they never put their clothes in the laundry basket. .
. . As they get older, they make less demands on our time because they're in
school, but the demands are greater in forming their values. . . . Best moment
of the day is when all the children are in bed. . . . The worst time of the day
is 4 P.M., when you have to get dinner started, the kids are tired, hungry and
crabby-every­body wants to talk to you about their day. . . your day is
only half over.

Once a mother, the
responsibility and concern for my children became so encompassing. . . . It took
a great deal of will to keep up other parts of my personality. . . . To me,
motherhood gets harder as they get older because you have less control. . . , In
an abstract sense, I'd have several. . . . In the non-abstract, I would not have
any. . . .

I had anticipated that the baby
would sleep and eat, sleep and eat. Instead, the experience was overwhelming. I
really had not thought particularly about what
motherhood would mean in a realistic sense. I want to do other things,
like to become involved in things that are worth­while-I don't mean women's
clubs-but I don't have the physical en­ergy to go out in the evenings. I feel
like I'm missing something. . . the experience of being somewhere with people
and having them talking about something-something that's going on in the world.

Every grownup person expects to
pay a price for his pleasures, but seldom is the price as vast as the one
endured "however happily" by most mothers. We have mentioned the literal cost
factor. But what does that mean? For middle-class American women, it means a
lifestyle with severe and usually unimagined limitations; i.e., life in the
suburbs, because who can afford three bedrooms in the city? And what do suburbs
mean? For women, suburbs mean other women and children and leftover
peanut-butter sandwiches and car pools and seldom­ seen husbands. Even the
Feminine Mystiqueniks-the housewives who finally admitted that their lives
behind brooms (OK, electric brooms) were driving them crazy-were loath to trace
their predica­ment to their children. But it is simply a fact that a childless
marriedwoman has no child-work and little housework.
She can live in a city, or, if she still chooses the suburbs or the country, she
can leave on the commuter train with her husband if she wants to. Even the most
ar­dent job-seeking mother will find little in the way of great opportunities in
Scarsdale. Besides, by the time she wakes up, she usually lacks both the
preparation for the outside world and the self-confidence to get it. You will
say there are plenty of city-dwelling working mothers.

But most of those women do
additional-funds-for-the-family kind of work, not the interesting career kind
that takes plugging during child­ bearing years.Nor is it a bed of petunias for
the mother who does make it profes­sionally. Says writer critic
Marya Mannes:

If the creative woman has
children, she must pay for this indulgence with a long burden of guilt, for her
life will be split three ways betweenthem and her
husband and her work. . . . No woman with any heart can compose a paragraph when
her child is in trouble. . . . The creativewoman has
no wife to protect her from intrusion. A man at his desk in a room with closed
door is a man at work. A woman at a desk in any room is available.

Speaking of jobs, do remember
that mothering, salary or not, is a job. Even those who can afford nurses to
handle the nitty-gritty still need to put out emotionally. "Well-cared-for"
neurotic rich kids are not exactly unknown in our society. One of the more
absurd aspects of the Myth is the underlying assumption that, since most women
are biologically equipped to bear children, they are psychologically, men­tally,
emotionally, and technically equipped (or interested) to rear them. Never mind
happiness. To assume that such an exacting, con­suming, and important task is
something almost all women are equipped to do is far more dangerous and
ridiculous than assuming that everyone with vocal chords should seek a career in
the opera.

A major expectation of the Myth
is that children make a not-so-hot marriage hotter, or a hot marriage, hotter
still. Yet almost every available study indicates that childless marriages are
far happier. One of the biggest, of 850 couples, was conducted by Dr. Harold
Feldman of CornellUniversity,
who states his finding in no uncertain terms: "Those couples with children had a
significantly lower level of marital satisfaction than did those without
children." Some of the reasons are obvious. Even the most adorable children
make for additional demands, complications, and hardships in the lives of even
the most loving parents. If a woman feels disappointed and trapped in her
mother role, it is bound to affect her marriage in any number of ways: she may
take out her frustrations directly on her husband, or she may count on him too
heavily for what she feels she is missing in her daily life.

". . . You begin to grow away
from your husband," says one of the Michigan ladies. "He's working on his career
and you're working on your family. But you both must gear your lives to the
children. You do things the children enjoy, more than things you might enjoy."
More subtle and possibly more serious is what motherhood may do to a woman's
sexuality. Often when the stork flies in, sexuality flies out. Both in the
emotional minds of some women and in the minds of their husbands, when a
woman becomes a mother, she stops being a woman. It's not only that motherhood
may destroy her physical attrac­tiveness, but its madonna concept may destroy
her feelings of sexuality.

And what of the payoff?
Usually, even the most self-sacrificing of maternal self-sacrificers expects a
little something back. Gratified parents are not unknown to the Western world,
but there are probably at least just as many who feel, to put it crudely,
shortchanged. The exper­iment mentioned earlier-where the baby ducks followed
vacuum cleaners instead of their mothers-indicates that what passes for love
from baby to mother is merely a rudimentary kind of object attachment. Without
necessarily feeling like a Hoover,
a lot of women become disheartened because babies and children are not only not
in­teresting to talk to (not everyone thrills at the wonders of da-da-ma­ma
talk) but they are generally not empathetic, considerate people. Even the nicest
children are not capable of empathy, surely a major ingredient of love, until
they are much older. Sometimes they're never capable of it. Dr. Wyatt says that
often, in later years particularly, when most of the "returns" are in, it is the
"good mother" who suffers most of all. It is then she must face a reality: The
child-the append­age with her genesis not an appendage, but a separate person.
What's more, he or she may be a separate person who doesn't even like her-or
whom she doesn't really like.

So if the music is lousy, how
come everyone's dancing? Because the motherhood minuet is taught freely from
birth, and whether or not she has rhythm or likes the music, every woman is
expected to do it. Indeed, she wants to do it. Little girls start
learning what to want­and what to be-when they are still in their cribs. Dr.
Miriam Keiffer, a young social psychologist at Bensalem, the Experimental
College of Fordham University, points to studies showing that at six months of
age, mothers are already treating their baby girls and boys quite differently.
For instance, mothers have been found to touch, comfort, and talk to their
females more. If these differences can be found at such an early stage, it's not
surprising that the end product is as differ­ent as it is. What is surprising is
that men and women are, in so many ways, similar.

Some people point to the way
little girls play with dolls as proof of their innate motherliness. But
remember, little girls are given dolls. When Margaret Mead presented some
dolls to New Guinea children, it was the boys, not the girls, who wanted to play
with them, which they did by crooning lullabies and rocking them in the most
maternal fashion.

By the time they reach
adolescence, most girls, unconsciously or not, have learned enough about role
definition to qualify for a master's degree. In general, the lesson has been
that no matter what kind of career thoughts one may entertain, one must, first
and foremost, be a wife and mother. A girl's mother is usually her first
teacher. As Dr. Goode says, "A woman is not only taught by society to have a
child; she is taught to have a child who will have a child." A woman who has
hung her life on the Motherhood Myth will almost always reinforce her young
married daughter's early training by pushing for grandchildren. Prospective
grandmothers are not the only ones. Husbands, too,can
be effective sellers. After all, they have the Fatherhood Myth to cope with. A
married man is supposed to have children. Often, particularly among Latins, children are a sign of potency. They help him as­sure the world-and
himself-that he is the big man he is supposed to be. Plus, children give him
both immortality (whatever that means) and possibly the chance to become more in
his lifetime through theaccomplishments of his
children, particularly his son. (Sometimes it's important, however, for the son
to do better, but not too much better.)

Friends, too, can be counted on
as myth-pushers. Naturally one wants to do what one's friends do. One study, by
the way, found a correlation between a woman's fertility and that of her three
closest friends. The negative sell comes into play here, too. We have seen what
the concept of non-mother means (cold, selfish, unwomanly, abnormal). In
practice, particularly in the suburbs, it can mean, simply, exclusion-both from
child-centered activities (that is, most activities) and child-centered
conversations (that is, most conversations). It can also mean being the butt of
a lot of unfunny jokes. ("Whaddya waiting for? An immaculate conception? Ha
ha.") Worst of all, it can mean being an object of pity.

In case she's escaped all those
pressures (that is, if she was brought up in a cave), a young married woman
often wants a baby just so that she'll (1) have something to do (motherhood is
better than clerk/typ­ist, which is often the only kind of job she can get,
since little more has been expected of her and, besides, her boss also expects
her to leave and be a mother); (2) have something to hug and possess, to be
needed by and have power over; and (3) have something to be-e.g., a
baby's mother. Motherhood affords an instant identity. First, through wifehood,
you are somebody's wife; then you are somebody's mother. Both give not only
identity and activity, but status and stardom of a kind. During pregnancy, a
woman can look forward to the kind of at­tention and pampering she may not ever
have gotten or may never otherwise get. Some women consider birth the biggest
accomplish­ment of their lives, which may be interpreted as saying not much for
the rest of their lives. As Dr. Goode says, "It's like the gambler who may know
the roulette wheel is crooked, but it's the only game in town." Also, with
motherhood, the feeling of accomplishment is immediate. It is really much faster
and easier to make a baby than paint a painting, or write a book, or get to the
point of accomplishment in a job. It is also easier in a way to shift focus from
self-development to child development-particularly since, for women,
self-development is considered selfish. Even unwed mothers may achieve a feeling
of this kind. (As we have seen, little thought is given to the aftermath.) And,
again, since so many women are underdeveloped as people, they feel that, besides
children, they have little else to give-to themselves, their husbands, to their
world.

You may ask why then, when the
realities do start pouring in, does a woman want to have a second, third, even
fourth child? OK, (1) just because reality is pouring in doesn't mean she
wants to face it. A new baby can help bring back some of the old
illusions. Says psychoanalyst Dr. Natalie Shainess, "She may view each
successive child as a knight in armor that will rescue her from being a 'bad
unhappy mother.' " (2) Next on the horror list of having no children, is having
one. It sufficesto say that only children are not
only OK, they even have a high rate of exceptionality. (3) Both parents
usually want at least one child of each sex. The husband, for reasons discussed
earlier, probably wants a son. (4) The more children one has, the more of an
excuse one has not to develop in any other way.

What's the point? A world
without children? Of course not. Nothing could be worse or more unlikely. No
matter what anyone says inLookor anywhere else, motherhood isn't about
to go out like a blown bulb, and who says it should? Only the Myth must go out,
and now it seems to be dimming.

The younger-generation females
who have been reared on the Myth have not rejected it totally, but at least they
recognize it can be more loving to children not to have them. And at least they
speak of adopt­ing children instead of bearing them. Moreover, since the new
non-­breeders are "less hung-up" on ownership, they seem to recognize that if
you dig loving children, you don't necessarily have to own one. The end of the
Motherhood Myth might make available more loving women (and men!) for those
children who already exist.

When motherhood is no longer
culturally compulsory, there will, certainly, be less of it. Women are now
beginning to think and do more about development of self, of their individual
resources. Far from being selfish, such development is probably our only hope.
That means more alternatives for women. And more alternatives mean more
selective, better, happier, motherhood-and childhood and husbandhood (or
manhood) and peoplehood. It is not a question of whether or not children are
sweet and marvelous to have and rear; the question is, even if that's so,
whether or not one wants to pay the price for it. It doesn't make sense any more
to pretend that women need babies, when what they really need is themselves. If
God were still speaking to us in a voice we could hear, even He would probably
say, "Be fruitful. Don't multiply."